Review: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

Illuminae is a suspenseful, engrossing non-traditional novel, and I loved it! The story of the novel follows Kady and her very recently ex-boyfriend Ezra after they have survived the obliteration of the mining colony they lived on. Now on separate spaceships, the novel follows their adventures as they attempt to not only survive, but discover the truths being hidden from civilians aboard the ships. Throw in a possibly rogue AI interface on one of the ships, and you’ve got a quite suspenseful and tragic, yet very fun, story.

The story isn’t told in a traditional sense, however. It’s collated and arranged as a data file, and is told through the AI’s operations, IMs and emails between Ezra and Kady, Kady’s journal, surveillance reports, and military documents. As a lover of anything out of the ordinary with books, I really enjoyed the format, and the piecing together of the story over various documents. It was always really exciting when I had a suspicion about a character’s possibly lying and it eventually turned out to be true. It made me feel very accomplished as a detective or something.

The story itself was very well assembled. This book had to take a ton of work to create, and it’s so well crafted. I found myself chuckling at Ezra’s romantic advances to Kady, and also crying at points in the narrative. Despite not being from one point of view, or even being a story in the traditional sense, there were still a ton of emotional ups and downs. The suspense at points in the story was so intense. Additionally, I never would’ve thought characters could have so much dimension in a book like this, but they do. Each character is well drawn through various documents, and you get to see different aspects of each one in the different documents. I loved having a complete novel through the documents presented here. This was an amazing book overall and I can’t wait for the sequel that’s soon to be released.